We judge African Americans based not only on whether we perceive them to be black but also on how black we perceive them to be.
Poor Abigail Fisher. She had her cake and wanted to eat it too. The Supreme Court appears ready to hand her a fork.
Whose bodies and lives will this grand social vision of a post-racial world benefit especially when considering the counter-investment in notions of "blackness" that post-racial propagandists seem to maintain?
Now that George Zimmerman has been charged in Trayvon Martin's death, I am wondering what's next. I'm not talking about the next steps in the judicial process, I want to know what's next when it comes to America's relationship with race.
I should have known by the look in his eyes. The middle-aged white man looked at my chocolate self, then to my light-skinned baby and back to me. "Excuse me," he said walking closer. "But is his father white or Asian?"
We must not and cannot dismiss these incidents as simply the actions of a few individuals, for racism and other forms of oppression exist on multiple levels. These incidents are symptoms of larger systemic national problems.
De Niro responds to Newt Gingrich's Response to De Niro's Words. Ann Coulter Defends De Niro Remark. These are typical headlines, the breaking news...
We've always been attacked by the closed-minded on both sides who refuse to understand that although the world itself is not yet "post-racial," popular culture has been so for years.
Despite the success of blues-influenced bands such as Led Zeppelin, The White Stripes, and The Black Keys, do you associate the blues with suburban wh...
On this, the 2012 remembrance of the birth of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., let me just offer three very random thoughts on the "post-racial" question.
Does race even matter in American society anymore? Of course it does. But as far as the American youth are concerned, my son included, race doesn't matter anymore, or not as much.
A few hours before the rally, the general manager of a Hampton Inn kicked me out of his hotel. Walking into a hotel for a business meeting is such a common occurrence it never dawned on me to be on guard.
It seems that the rush to declare the Obama presidency the harbinger of a "post-racial America" has coincided with a concurrent rush to forget what was once widely known about racism.
African Americans' expectation was that Obama would display some of the steeliness so overtly recognizable in the African American persona. But President Obama's perspective is international, not African American.
The White House and many liberal pundits have been trapped by the false either/or paradigm that refuses to accept the new racial order. The net result is that they cave to the right-wings' insistence that to notice race is itself racist.
In a country that's supposedly so past race, it's quite amusing to watch folks completely trip over it.
Are you going to take responsibility for creating the change you voted for, or will you sit back and throw stones at the guy in office, even if you campaigned for him?
Kagan, as is well known by now, clerked for Justice Thurgood Marshall, the Supreme Court's first African-American. Apparently, there is no statute of limitations on the kind of attacks Marshall endured in life.
Whatever the initial rationale behind "mainstream media" leaving white people out of the race beat, recent events argue that it's time to reexamine that decision.
Anyone who thought the inauguration of Barack Obama as president heralded the end of racism in America, should look no further than the tea party rallies held last weekend.
I would agree with Mr. Rather on one point he attempted to make in defense of himself. I do think that the media is complicit in getting the story of race in the Age of Obama wrong.
The real conversation on race, like it or not, is still pending. Barack Obama's win was a profound public testimony to American decency. But in numerous areas, blacks remain severely disadvantaged.
The past four decades have been a mixture of social growing pains and progress. Even with that said, most people never believed that a Black man would become the President.
"I don't know, maybe it's this whole post-racial thing this country is going through, but when I see Rod Blagojevich on TV I have to basically remind myself that, hey, here's a black guy," he said. "I mean, it's so weird."
No matter what kind of shape-shifters or mask-wearers we are as African Americans leaders, even our post-racial leaders are finding out that the nagging issue of race is an unavoidable issue.
